How one atheist sees life

Artificial Non-Intelligence?

A short post, a thought. Something congealing in the back of my brain that I want to write down.

Kurzwell and Hawkins are both wrong, fundamentally, with hierarchical pattern recognition being the building block of the human brain. They’re right, but that is not what leads to the emergence of the mind.

Like a blind man laying on the floor and declaring that houses are made from the building blocks of carpet fibers.

This is why, primarily, AI has failed so far – in my opinion. It’s not about ‘how’ we recognize patterns though this is infinitely important. It is what we do with the meta data about the pattern recognized. A 6 month old child can stick their finger in their mouth and bite down – instantly building associations about the real world and parts of their brains. What AI has produced so far is not even half as complex as this simple act repeated by all children before they know how to say one word.

Recreating the circuits of a human brain are only sufficient if the device is connected to all the limbs and sensors that a human brain is. Evolution is fairly conservative in what it is willing to wast time and energy on. Much of what Kurzwell and Hawkins worry themselves with is the accumulation of meta data about sensory data. They have not even begun to utilize that meta data and the patterns to be found within it and the meta data from that and so on.

It is often good to look at broken systems to unpack what the good ones do. Think of Helen Keller. For Kurzwell and Hawkins et al to get it right they have to imitate Helen Keller and they are not even trying to do that.